Sunday, July 13, 2003

Of course, other things I forgot to mention are now nipping out of the woodwork, the most obvious of which is my part in the latest one of art spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's marvellous Little Lit collections, "It Was A Dark And Silly Night" (the book has its own website at http://www.little-lit.com/ll3.html and very cool it is too). My story was drawn by the wonderful Gahan Wilson. (It was Maddy's second favourite story in there, after the Lemony Snicket and Richard Sala Yeti tale.)

and while I didn't quite manage entirely to forget it, I didn't say anything about this book, which Luis Rodrigues writes from Portugal and from Fantastic Metropolis to tell me about:

Cheers Mr Gaiman,

I have an advance copy of the Lambshead Guide in hand and I must say this is
a beautiful, beautiful thing. The illustrations and design by John
Coulthart are impeccable, even though he's not yet finished with them.

The stories (at least those I read, including yours) are hilarious, I
heartily recommend the stuff by Stepan Chapman, Jeff Ford and Michael Cisco,
woefully under-appreciated writers if you ask me. Not that the others
aren't as good: everything is great here.

The section on past editions of the Lamsbhead Guide is another big
highlight. Mike Moorcock's disease (the Samoan Rat Fever) is great, and
perfectly laid out in flawless mock-Victorian design by John Coulthart.
Another disease, supposedly from an edition of the guide compiled by J. L.
Borges, is presented in both Spanish and English versions.

A magnificent book, thanks and congratulations for being a part of it!

Do you think you can plug the www.neilgaiman.net booth at Comic-Con on your
blogger? Nancy and I will be running it for Greg Ketter. We'll have hundreds of
TELLING TALES, and other stuff. The booth number is #1035. We'll be setup for the
Preview Night on Wednesday.

Lovely article on bestsellers in the Observer by Tim Adams, who had to read all the current bestseller list and write about them. Oddly, for someone who doesn't miss much, he doesn't mention something fairly specific, which is that this is a late summer bestseller list, consisting mostly of books which publishers published as big beach books. (There's a reason why Wilbur Smith was on the same list for the same time of year ten years ago and twenty years ago. It's not a coincidence.) It's a different kind of mix to, for example, your September-October lists, in which publishers roll out the big books that they think may take them to Christmas.

Hello -
I just have a question about 'Two Plays for Voices.' I was wondering if a text of it is either included with the Cd/tape or floating around anywhere. I'm hearing impaired, and the description of the audio is lovely, but I might have some difficulty, well, hearing it.

Thank you,
Jenn

Hi Jenn -- no, there isn't. And apart from Biting Dog Press's beautiful limited editions, with engravings by George Walker, the texts aren't available anywhere. And a quick look at Biting Dog's website (http://www.bitingdogpress.com/Merchandise/orderpage.html) shows that their books are now out of print.

Several other people have written in and asked about getting the scripts for Two Plays in order to put on local productions of "Murder Mysteries" or "Snow, Glass, Apples" or both.

What I may do is just put them both up here on the website as exclusive materials, where they can sit alongside the Chthulhu autobiography (which I wrote when I was about 22) and the Dave McKean essay (which I didn't).

(Incidentally, someone wrote to ask when this blog would get permalinks. It's had permalinks for quite a while now -- just click on the time, after it says "posted by Neil Gaiman".)